Keith Urban Brings Old Tunes Out of Retirement

Once an artist has been around for a while, say 17 years or so, they tend to be blessed with a big problem: a list of hits too long to fit into a 90-minute show.

So, they end up taking old songs out of the set list to fit some new stuff in.

But Keith Urban is going to kind of do the opposite tonight (June 2) when he kicks off his world tour in Kansas. He said he wants to bring in some older songs he hasn’t done in a while.

“We retire a lot of songs from certain tours,” Urban said in a recent radio interview. “But I’m always aware that X amount of people want to hear some of those songs.”

And while he wants to give those classics a “fresh coat of paint,” he’s not going to change them so much that fans can’t sing along. As a live music fan himself, he knows the feeling.

He said, “I find sometimes I go see artists play and when they do some of their older hits, they sing them in a way in which it seems like they’re obligated to, and they don’t want to do it and that sort of thing. And then they start changing the melody and no one can sing along. So, I’ve never been a fan of that.”

When Urban does sample some of the new songs off his Ripcord album, I hope he plays “Boy Gets a Truck.” The song, written by Aaron Scherz and Ash Bowers, has kind of a “Don’t Take the Girl” plus “Don’t Blink” vibe. The lyrics alone tell the story so well:

“A boy gets a truck/Truck gets a girl/Girl gets a midnight feeling he’s the one/One night turns to love/Love turns into one knee down/Down payment on a three-bedroom house/Filled with the sound of little feet/Then you blink/And he’s asking for the keys to pick her up,”

The whole album is getting rave reviews, but this one song seems to have struck a nerve with fans, critics and even other artists. When Dierks Bentley listened to it, he tweeted he had to sit down when he heard this one.

walking the streets of London listening to @KeithUrban new album ripcord. next level. had to sit down when i heard 'boy gets a truck.' wow..